


seen and touched by the merciful

by mickleborger



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, POV Third Person, terrible haunted places are people too, the feywild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 09:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16784512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: hello it's me with the plant-based body horror and the archfey au hello hello





	seen and touched by the merciful

**Author's Note:**

> (Diablo Swing Orchestra, "Mass Rapture")

i.

 _This is not what I meant_ , he does not say, his fingers closing around a warm red thing that in this place will never stop beating.

The blood on her hands and mouth is bright and red, brighter than anything he has seen in his bog in a long time if ever. It brings out the blue of her eyes, also brighter than the bog; and hungrier. The corners of her red mouth are twitching slightly upwards and she is watching him, daring him to say this is not what he wanted, that she does not belong here. He cannot. He invited her in. She is clashing with the walls around them both, dressed though as a hunter in colors too vibrant, shining mortal in a drab immortal world.

He weighs the hot bloody thing she has given him because she has no use for it in his hand and holds her terrible mortal gaze and does not say _well done_.

ii.

It is only her heart he has. He asked for nothing more.

He says nothing to her about Vesrah and the promises he wishes she had not made, but clearly something in the bog has told her that he is not himself today. She eyes him from the shadows, her hand resting over the patch of green growing through the tear where her heart should be. Somewhere deep inside the tree it lies, as red as the day she gave it.

She says nothing, either. She doesn't have to. In the open air beyond the parts of the Feywild he has sprawled over he hears wings blacker than his heart beat.

iii.

Her heart, he should have known, flutters around the bog picking at the vines like the little black bird he must have called her, once. She is standing under the tree, eyes still too blue, blood still so red. The thing growing out of her chest has bloomed and sometimes it turns to watch what she watches -- like her heart, little magpie of a cursed organ that she loves much better now it is the burden of another.

 _Intruder_ , he does not say to the rush of wings further away still than his charge and her bleeding, beating heart, because he knows what feathers she has in her hair. He knows what he let in.

iv.

They are in the shade of another tree, a healthy tree, a tree that belongs nowhere near the Feywild. The thing growing in place of Vex's blood is not visible here, overgrown though it is. Keyleth feels it on her fingers when they hold hands, the smallest of shoots poking out of Vex's skin and wrapping delicately around her fingers. Keyleth has seen it. She saw it when Vex took her to the bog to see what had come of it, what had come of her; to see the rust-red flowers blooming where she steps, leaves like dragon-maws, runners wrapped around rotted logs and lanced through them, around the roots of the withered tree at the heart of it all.

Keyleth did not say anything to or about the tree then, nor will she ever; she druidcrafts little buttons of pale gold and sets them beside the gnawing red blooms, and watches Vex do exactly what she means to do.

v.

The beating of wings is louder with every passing instant and she is moving quietly in shadows that used to be well within his field of vision. Her little corvid heart lurks around his head, murmuring in a way hearts do not. There is a flash of light in the darkness, a glimmer of blue-blue eyes that will not change in a thousand years. There are things curling around his ankles that do not belong to him.

He knows what he asked for. He knows what he asked for.

vi.

A raven lands between them in the frosty autumn morning, singing of the coming season. Vex's head is on Keyleth's shoulder and the thing growing out of Vex has tangled itself in Keyleth's hair, red and green against other reds and greens, and the reds and greens of the sky beyond. The raven is black, blacker than midnight, blacker than anything that lives, has lived, will ever live. Vex braids his feathers into Keyleth's hair, as he used to do for her, as he cannot now do for either of them; and the leaves of the thing she has grown in place of her heart change shape.

vii.

Deep in the Feywild there is a bog that has been grown over -- not healed, no, not cleansed; not returned to what it had been. She found use in what was there. New things have grown on the old and dead things.

In the heart of the tree there is something in the shape of a man, gaunt and cold and still, mantled in chattering vines that reach far up into the trunk. In its petrified hands there is something very red, gently thumping.

The thing that lives in the tree now gazes out past the line of saplings to another tree that only she can see, to answer a whisper only she can hear. She gathers flowers like drops of summer dusk to her face and kisses them, smiling. The tree on the other side of the story is tending the flowers like a winter's dawn in her arms.

Somewhere in the distance, coming closer, is the sound of wings.


End file.
